this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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There are usually some tells. For AI generated music (AIGM for short) the cover “art” is also AI generated. The vocals/style are different between tracks. Another method that I think was recently made obsolete was that if you opened the track in audacity it looked weird compared to regular music when you looked at the spectrograms because AIGM added some weird unnecessary noise to the music. AIGM “artists” usually don’t have any social media presence, they don’t really exist outside of the internet. No shows/interviews etc. Is it a lot of effort to find out whether something is AIGM? Maybe. Is it worth it? Yes, I don’t want to give money to people who desecrate the art or music.
So you're saying a milli vanilli would be basically impossible to detect.
Besides, who cares? Isn't the purpose to enjoy the music? Whether some uses a capella, instruments, electric instruments, autotune, vocaloid or AI... if you like the music, listen to the music. It's ultimately created by a human using tools.
I disagree on all counts.
It's not exploitative, it doesn't exploit anyone.
It's not trash, and if it were you wouldn't need to regulate it because people would reject it on the merits.
The space belongs to whoever wants to create art, with whatever tools they want to do it. Gatekeeping and true Scotsman arguments are really grasping.
I don't know what "social value" is created. A nurse or a fireman create social value. You won't see them worrying about AI. If AI could put out fires they would definitely be interested.
It had to be trained on music created by human artists. Those artists were not compensated.
I would reject if I knew it was AI. I can't always tell, though.
The owners of Bandcamp get to set the rules, because they own it.
You can't always tell, I can't always tell, bandcamp can't always tell. And it's only going to get harder.
I think you might misunderstood what Bandcamp is aiming for here. They're explicitly trying to still allow it when humans are using it (responsibly) as tools. This is essentially a ban on AI where no human is involved (or not involved enough), where the music produced is focused on quantity over quality (slop). That's a fine and nuanced distinction for a music distribution platform in my opinion.
Ok, if this is just a spam prevention I think it's fine. Obviously I didn't read the article (as tradition mandates).
If AIGM was like VSTs or vocaloids that'd be one thing. But it's more like imitation of sounds, synthesizing song chunks instead of instruments and voices themselves.
The best way to think of it is something creating an audio file solely by using the Photoshop clone stamp tool across millions of source files.
That's not how transformer neural networks work...
Sure, but we're talking generative here, as is the article, and to pretend it's referring to a tool that's been standard in libraries and even VSTs for over a decade is either misunderstanding the article or being disingenuous on purpose.
No, I get it. It's generative. GPT: Generative Pretrained Transformer. Music generators add a diffusion layer, but it's fundamentally new music being generated, not copies of existing songs.
My point is that it's just another tool, that automates it even more. It's not the same, it's the next step.
A text prompt -> audio is not a transformer in the sense of what people are talking about, and you know it or just don't care, or don't wholly understand how these systems work under the hood as well.
What I'm referring to are neural models that take an input audio and are effectively a filter that operates as a neural network. Voice mods, instrument adapters, virtual pedals, amp models... These are all actually transformative. There is actual music and effort going into these. And that is not what Bandcamp is after; those were already in heavy use like 15 years ago.
The things that generate based on text are a transformer in the most technically correct sense but not in the sense of what is meant when people talk about transformative.
They're fundamentally different purposes and usages. It's not generated vocals from nothing but the lyrics; it's someone else actually singing it and then a model transforming the sound to match an intended pre-set trained target, not generalization.
They are a transformer in the same sense ChatGPT is a transformer. And hence they do generate new content that share characteristics and patterns with existing one. It's no clone tool. Lyrics are new. They probably follow the grammar rules of certain language, but it's not copy paste. Chords will probably be shared, but melody is new. Etc.
You suck
Well, maybe.
not the same thing. AIGM is by definition not created by a human.
if i tell you to create a song about a recent breakup i got through, gave you some notes about rhythm and maybe what kind of feel i would like it to have, and then you went ahead and composed the whole song, played all the instruments, provided the vocals, did the mixing and editing and gave me the result, do you think it's fair to say i made the song?
Same as vocaloid. Or autotune. How far do we go?
Besides, again, who cares. If you like the music, enjoy it, if not, pass.
I care. Clearly so do the people in support of this decision on here as well as bandcamp themselves.
I hope you are familiar with survivorship bias.
how is it like auto tune? auto tune corrects your singing, it doesn't sing for you.
also, humans care? that's kind of the entire point of art? we care where art comes from. find the best painter in the world, have them make mona lisa's exact copy, and see if it sells for even remotely similar price as Mona Lisa's estimated value which is probably around a billion dollars. anyone can "enjoy" an exact copy, no?
no. we care about art because art tells stories. human stories. computers don't have stories to tell. they can imitate, but the best it can ever be will be as valuable as an imitation: not much.
What does monetary worth have to do with anything? A photo of the Mona Lisa is an exact replica, you could even make it bigger to appreciate the details better. If what you like is the picture, you can have it. If what you want is speculation and tax write offs, then you need the scarcity.
oh ok, so you're a bot. there's no way a human being would think like that. someone programmed a bot to defend genAI.
a bigger photo. Jesus.
Yes, I'm a bot. Here's your cookie recipe!